Power in Movement symbolism of landless peasants everywhere. But when the movement gained resonance in the capital and in North America and Europe, ir was mainly as an "indigenous movement," and the message of movement leaders shifted from peasant-based claims to demands that were heavily inflected with the symbolism of indigenous Indians oppressed by five hundred years of white and mestizo power. The cultural turn is a refreshing departure from the heavy structuralism that had weighted down previous accounts of contentious politics (see Chapter i), but if it fails to connect framing, identity, and emotion to the political process, it risks becoming every bit as deterministic as its structuralist predecessor. What is the solution? Framing, identity construction, and emotions cannot be simply read like a "text," independent of the strategies of movements and the conditions in which they struggle. Out of a cultural reservoir of possible symbols, movement entrepreneurs choose those they hope will mediate among the cultural understandings of the groups they wish to appeal to, their own beliefs and aspirations, and their situations of struggle to create solidarity and animate collective action (Laitin 1988). To relate text to context, the grammar of culture to the semantics of struggle, we need to turn from framing, identity construction, and emotions to how movements intersect with their contexts. We need to examine, in particular, the structure of opportunities and the constraints in which they operate. We turn to this important intersection in the next chapter. 8 Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes A COLLAPSING REGIME In the late 1380s, contentious politics arose in the highly centralized and police-and-party controlled Soviet Union. Mark Beissinger documented the rise and dynamics of contentious politics there - which began as a wave of peaceful demonstrations, strikes, and protest marches, but evolved into violent nationalist-inspired riots and militarized conflicts (Beissinger 2.002.). Figure S.i shows what Beissinger found when he employed a protest event analysis to see what was happening during the last years of the Soviet Union: How could so massive a wave of political contention develop in so centralized a regime after decades of repression? The simplest answer was provided by Alexis de Tocqueville. Because people act on opportunities, he observed, "the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways" (1955: t76_I77)- Tocqueville was writing of the collapse of the French Old Regime; had he been present two hundred years later, he might well have applied his theory to the Soviet Union. There, as in France in the 1780s, an international power mired in corruption and torpor and unable to compete with a more dynamic market-oriented society (Bunce 1985; cf. Skocpol 1979) sought to reform itself from within. Incoming party secretary Mikhael Gorbachev was convinced that his country could not survive as a world power without reform. As a result, the late 1980s "engendered a process of liberalization that sparked an explosion of organized extra-state political activity" {Fish 1995: 32.). As was to be expected in so centralized a system, liberalization began at the top, with a change in official thinking and policy on both foreign policy and questions of participation and association. Gorbachev had proposed a modest concept of socialist pluralism, which "amounted to de facto toleration of the formation of some small, non-state citizens' organizations" (Ibid.). But it did not take long for the new possibilities he offered to stimulate more independent initiatives. For example, a group called "Memorial," dedicated to investigating 157 i j s Potver in Movement 3t>0 -1---—, 1387 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 Year figure 8.1. Demonstrations and Violent Events in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States, 1987-1991. Source: Original data provided by Mark Beissinger, from his Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge University Press, 1002. the crimes of Stalinism, quickly formed; another, called "Citizen's Dignity," dedicated to promoting human rights, soon followed (Ibid.); and eventually, a reform faction developed within the ruling Communist Party, calling for movement toward a multi-parry system. To some extent, Gorbachev's desire for liberalization was based only on the idea of stimulating more open discussion (glasnost). But he quickly realized that without a renovation of the political class, his plans would be stymied by official obstruction. As a result, he transformed the usually formalistic elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies into "the first even partially open and competitive national election in the history of the Soviet Union" (Fish, PP- 35~3^)- Although the election's rules reserved a third of the seats for party-controlled representatives, it conferred on independents the mantle of legitimacy. "Perhaps of greatest moment," writes Steven Fish, "the balloting engendered the closest thing that the populace had ever known to a real election campaign" (p. 35). But the reformers were few and disorganized. Lacking internal resources and possessing weak connective ties and little mutual trust, they divided into competing factions and parties (Fish, pp. 35. ff). What they profited from was external support - like that accorded them when the secretary of the Moscow Communist Party Committee, Boris Yeltsin, gave informal support to a conference of political discussion groups called "Social Initiative for Per-estroika" (p. 31). External help also appeared from the coal miners of the Kuzbass and the Donbass, who went on strike in 1989, and from Eastern Europe, where Gorbachev's reforms - and particularly his removal of the threat of Red Army intervention - triggered a wave of democratization movements Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes 159 (Fish, pp. 39-41). These "allies" - both conscious and involuntary, internal and external - added to the confidence of insurgents in the USSR that change was inevitable. Not all the stirrings of dissent were aimed at democratization. Soon after liberalization began at the center, long-repressed nationalist sentiments began to stir in the Soviet Union's far-flung minority republics. First in Georgia and the Baltic states, then in Armenia, Ukraine, and the central Asian republics, separatist movements began to mobilize. In many cases, they resorted to violence against other ethnic groups or the center; in some, such as Kazakhstan, Communist Party elites turned into peripheral nationalists practically overnight (Tilly and Tarrow 1007: 104-105). Beissinger's data in Figure 8.1 show that as the cycle of contention gathered steam, more and more of it took violent forms, mainly from among nationalist groups in the periphery of the USSR, who threatened and were threatened by other groups and by the state. As 1990 dawned, these developments were accompanied by a decline in the state's capacity for repression. As Fish concluded: The center and the party could prevent, obstruct, and coerce; but they could no longer even pretend to initiate, create, and convince____A motley conglomeration of autonomous social organizations, spearheading a popular movement for democracy, had rendered power visible----In doing so, they had begun to push it toward its demise (p. 51). Seeing the growing prospect of the regime's collapse, in August 1991 conservative elements in the Communist Party elite launched a countermovement, bringing tanks onto the streets of Moscow, and threatening a return to the harsh Stalinist regime that Gorbachev had tried to liquidate. The threat was opposed by Yeltsin, who rallied the populace and other elements of the army in a dramatic standoff at the Moscow White House. The coup plotters were defeated, but Gorbachev's power was broken, and Yeltsin emerged as leader and officiated over the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Bonnell, Cooper, and Freiden 1994). WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE? First, in a pattern strikingly close to what Tocqueville would have predicted, a cycle of reform begun at the top triggered a spiral of opportunities and threats. It offered political opportunities to groups seeking liberalization through institutional means. This encouraged other groups, who mobilized, using the opportunities they opened. Third, this sapped the elite's will to resist and ate away at the centralized structure of the USSR. Fourth, a countermovement threatened both reformers and peripheral nationalists and was defeated, finally, by Yeltsin, an opportunistic reformer who put together a coalition built around the core Russian Republic. The turbulence unleashed by Gorbachev's reforms not only produced opportunities; it posed a number of threats - to members of the elite whose positions in the state and in the Communist Party apparatus were threatened by them; j^gQ Power in Movement to the majority Russian etlinic group whose dominant posirion was undercut by peripheral separatism; and to "certified" minorities whose position in some peripheral Republics was threatened by others, such as the Ajerbaija-nis, who were attacked by minority Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Threats and opportunities combined in a major challenge to the Soviet regime, bringing about its eventual collapse. Finally, we saw a process typical of the beginning of regime change: combinations of old and new repertoires; new actors like Memorial alongside old ones like the Communist Patty and newly revived ones like the separatist movements, which took advantage of the chaos at the center to stake their claims; threats of revanchment from party and military elites attempting to stop the slide to democracy and dissolution. Opportunities, threats, and regime change came together in the former Soviet Union, producing a new and hybrid form of regime. In this chapter, I will examine, first, political opportunities, then, threats; finally, I will turn to how changes in regimes intersect with processes of contentious politics. Opportunities and Threats Contention increases when people gain access to external resources that convince them that they can end injustices and find opportunities in which to use these resources. It also increases when they are threatened by costs, which outrage their interests, their values, or their sense of justice, but they still see a chance to succeed. When institutional access opens, rifts appear within elites, allies become available, and state capacity for repression declines, challengers see opportunities to advance their claims. When these are combined with high levels of threat but declining capacity for repression, such opportunities produce episodes of contentious politics, sometimes producing changes in regimes. It is time to define these terms: Opportunities I will define, following Jack Goldstone and Charles Tilly, as "the [perceived] probability that social protest actions will lead to success in achieving a desired outcome" (2001: 182). "Thus," they continue, "any changes that shift the balance of political and economic resources between a state and challengers, that weaken a state's ability to reward its followers or opponents or to pursue a coherent policy, or that shift domestic or outside support away from the regime, increases opportunities" (pp. 182-183). Threats, which are often seen as only the "flip side" of opportunities, are actually analytically distinct. Threat relates to the risks and costs of action or inaction, rather than the prospect of success. "Let us label the costs that a social group will incur from protest," continue Goldstone and Tilly, "or that it expects to suffer if it does not take action, as a 'threat.' A group may decide to bear very high costs for protest," they conclude, "if it believes the chances of success are high, but the same group may decide to avoid even modest costs of protest if it believes the chances of succeeding are low" (p. 183). Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes z- Individuals and groups may be constrained from acting collectively by threats of repression that are more apparent than real. This was undoubtedly the case in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union before 1989, because citizens were unaware of how weak their regimes really were (Kuran 1991; Lohmann 1994). By the same token, insurgents may launch themselves into action because they see opportunities but fail to perceive the threats that authorities hold in reserve. This was the case during the "Hundred Flowers" campaign in Maoist China, when the apparent opening of the regime was a pretext to bring dissidents into the open, where they could be identified and repressed. The perception and attribution of opportunities have two crucial correlates. First, what we might call "pseudo-opportunities," that is, when opportunities are perceived but have little or no objective existence. This can lead to disaster, as it did for the second group of strikers at the Honda plant we saw during the 2010 strikes in China (see Chapter 6). Second, the sequencing of opportunities within cycles of contention (see Chapter 10). Early challengers who achieve success reveal the vulnerability of elites and institutions to weaker players, who may believe they will enjoy the same advantages as their predecessors (McAdam 1995). But weak actors who attempt to follow in the footsteps of stronger ones may be doomed to failure, either because they lack the same level of resources or because authorities have learned how to organize against them. Both of these were the causes of failures among the later "color revolutionaries" in Central Asia in 2001-2.005. Insurgents in this region attempted to follow the examples of the Slovakians, Serbs, and Ukrainians whose electoral revolutions had succeeded, but without their resources; after authorities had become aware of the danger, their challenges were savagely repressed (Bunce and Wolchik 2.006). Although some scholars have expanded the use of die term "opportunities" to include "discursive opportunities" (Koopmans and Olzak 2004; Broer and Duyvendak 2009) and "organizational opportunities" (Kurzman 1998), such conceptual expansion risks allowing virtually any change in the environment to be seen as part of "opportunity structure."-" For this reason, it seems more useful to restrict the concept to factors in the environment that visibly and proximately open up the prospect of success (Goldstone and Tilly 2001). Most important among such factors are (1) opening of access to participation for new 4 Other scholars have further expanded the concept to include other dimensions, for example, to "gendered opportunity structure" (McCammon 2001) or the "legal opportunity structure" (Pedriana 2006). I "-J Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes 165 I actors; (2) evidence of political realignment within the polity; (3) availability of influential allies; and (4) emerging splits within the elite. For the same reason, it seems most useful to limit the concept of threat to the state's and other actors* capacity or will to control dissent. INCREASING ACCESS Sensible people do not often attack well-fortified opponents when opportunities are closed; gaining some access to participation can provide them with such incentives. But are people who possess full political rights any more likely to engage in contention dian those with none? Peter Eisinger argues that the relationship between protest and political opportunity is not linear but curvilinear: Neither full access nor its absence produces the greatest degree of protest. Eisinger explains that in closed systems, contention is restrained by fear of repression, while in fully open ones, prospective protesters turn to more institutionalized channels. Taking his cue from Tocqueville, Eisinger (1973: 15) writes that protest is mast likely "in systems characterized by a mix of open and closed factors."5 His research on American cities demonstrated that urban protest movements in the 19605 were most likely to emerge at intermediate levels of opportunity. SHIFTING ALIGNMENTS A second element that can encourage contention is the instability of political alignments. In democratic systems, this is measured most centrally by electoral instability. Especially when they are based on new coalitions, the changing fortunes of government and opposition parties create uncertainty among supporters, encourage challengers to try to exercise marginal power, and may even induce elites to compete for support from outside the polity. The importance of electoral realignments in opening opportunities can be seen in the American Civil Rights movement. Throughout the 1950s, racial "exclusionists" in the Southern wing of the Democratic party were weakened by defections to the Republicans, while the number of Democratic "inclusionists" was growing stronger (Valelly 1993). The decline of the Southern white vote and the move of African American voters to the cities, where Jim Crow was less oppressive, increased the incentive for the Democrats to seek black electoral support. With its razor-thin electoral margin, the Kennedy Administration was forced to move from cautious foot dragging to seizing the initiative for civil rights. ' Eisinger's claim was based on more than a TocqueviUian hunch. Operationalizing opportunity structure in American cities through differences in the formal and informal political structures of local government, he studied the behavior of urban protest groups in a sample of fifty-three cities during the turbulent 19605. He found that the level of activism of these groups was highest not where access was open or closed, but ac intermediate levels of political opportunity. 166 Power in Movement DIVIDED ELITES Conflicts within and among elites can also encourage outbreaks of contention. Divisions among elites not only provide incentives to resource-poor groups to take the risks of collective action, they encourage portions of the elite that are out of power to seize the role of "tribunes of the people." History provides numerous examples of divided elites bringing resources to emerging movements. Splits within the elite played a key role in the challenges to communism in East Central Europe, especially after Gorbachev warned the Communist states of the region that the Red Army would no longer intervene to defend them. This was seen by wobbling elites as a signal to join the opposition. Splits in the elite were also important in the transitions to democracy in authoritarian Spain and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s, where the divisions between soft-liners and hard-liners provided openings for opposition movements to exploit (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986: 19; Bermeo 1997). Finally, splits in the elite enabled the success of the Sandinista guerillas in coming to power in Nicaragua (McAdam et al. 2001: Chapter 7). INFLUENTIAL ALLIES A fourth aspect of political opportunity is the presence of influential allies. Challengers are encouraged to take collective action when they have allies who can act as friends in court, as guarantors against repression, or as acceptable negotiators on their behalf. As we saw earlier, both through Yeltsin's apparent support for their efforts and through the independent activities of the miners and East European dissidents, challengers in the USSR gained both confidence and models for collective action. William Gamson's book on contention in the United States (1990) provides historical evidence for similar processes in democratic systems.' And as we will see in Chapter 12., external actors such as transnational nongovernmental advocacy organizations (NGOs) can sometimes be crucial allies of domestic human rights groups in the global South (Keck and Sikkink 1998). These mechanisms of opening and closing political opportunity are arrayed differentially in different systems and change over time - often independently, but sometimes in close connection with one another. For example, splits among elites and political realignments can work together to induce disaffected groups to seek support from outsiders. When minority factions of the elite ally with outside challengers, challenges from inside and outside the polity combine in major cycles of contention (see Chapter 10). And these elements of opportunity 6 William Gamson's research shows a correlation between influential allies and movement success. In the 53 "conflict groups" he studied, the presence or absence of political allies was closely related to whether or not these groups succeeded (1990: 64-66). In studying American Farmworker movements in the 19405 and 1360s, Craig Jenkins and Charles Perrow found a similar contrast: The advantage of the United Farm Workers in the 19605 lay in the presence of external constituencies that their predecessors in the 1940s had lacked {1977). Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes 167 are malleable and need to be seen in connection with repression and the threat of repression. Making and Diffusing Opportunities Contentious collective action demonstrates the possibilities of collective action to others and offers even resource-poor groups opportunities that their lack of internal resources would deny them. This occurs when "early risers" make claims on elites that can be used by "spin-off movements," which have fewer resources (McAdam 1995). Moreover, early risers can expose opponents' points of weakness that may not be evident until they have been challenged. Their actions can also reveal unsuspected or formerly passive allies both within and outside the system. Finally, the efforts of early risers create "master frames" and can pry open institutional barriers through which the demands of other groups can pour. Once collective action is launched in part of a system on behalf of one type of goal by a particular group, the encounter between that group and its antagonists provides models of collective action, master frames, and mobilizing structures that produce new opportunities. These secondary effects take three general forms: the expansion of a group's own opportunities and those of cognate groups; the dialectic between movements and countermovements; and the unintended creation of opportunities for elites and authorities. EXPANDING ONE'S OWN OPPORTUNITIES Challengers are strategic actors, but they are not always strategically astute. Some surge forward without looking to left or right, taking the initial disorganization or unpreparedness of their targets as permanent weakness. Inexperienced protesters often underestimate the reserves of their opponents. But challengers may also be strategically more savvy. William Gamson's research showed that the most successful groups that he studied in American history sought not new advantages but increased access (1990). That access could then become a new and more durable opportunity structure for the same actors. The same was true of the Solidarity activists in Poland in 19 8 0-19 81; their insistence on recognition of trade union rights over immediate advantages was aimed at guaranteeing them future opportunities. It may also prove true of the emerging Chinese labor movement, a shift that we saw hints of in Chapter 6. EXPANDING OTHERS' OPPORTUNITIES One of the most remarkable characteristics of contentious politics is that it expands opportunities for others. Protesting groups put issues on the agenda with which other people identify and that demonstrate the utility of collective action that others can copy or innovate upon. For example, as we saw in Chapter 7, the American Civil Rights movement expanded the doctrine of rights that became the "master frame" of the 1960s and 1970s (Hamilton 1986). T (5S Power in Movement Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes Collective action embodies claims in dramatic ways that show others the way. This was die case for Latinos and other minority ethnic groups who took advantage of the opportunity structure opened by the efforts of the black-led Civil Rights movement (Browning, Marshall and Tabb 1984). Together, these cognate movements can eventually constitute an alliance system (Kriesi et al., 1995) . These others, however, may not be particularly friendly to the groups that expand their opportunities. MOVEMENTS AND COUNTERMOVEMENTS Not only does expansion of opportunities affect a movement's "alliance system," a movement that offends influential groups can trigger a countermove-ment (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). Movements that employ violence invite physical repression. Movements that make extreme forms of policy demand can be outmaneuvered by groups that pose the same claim in more acceptable form. And when a movement's success threatens another group in the context of heightened mobilization, this can lead to outbidding and counterprotest. For example, the spiral of conflict between the American Pro-Choice and Pro-Life movements shows how movements create opportunities for opponents. The access to abortion rights that was decreed by the Supreme Court in the early 1970s galvanized Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants to organize against abortion clinics. This Pro-Life movement became so dynamic that it was a major force in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment (Mansbridge 1986). Eventually, a radical offshoot of Pro-Life called "Operation Rescue" used such radical direct tactics in the early 1990s that it stimulated a countermobilization campaign by the usually legalistic Pro-Choice forces (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996) . MAKING OPPORTUNITIES FOR ELITES AND PARTIES Finally, protesters create political opportunities for elites - both in a negative sense, when their actions provide grounds for repression, and in a positive one, when opportunistic politicians seize the opportunity created by challengers to proclaim themselves tribunes of the people. Protesters on their own seldom have the power to affect the policy priorities of elites. This is so both because their protests often take an expressive form, and because elites are unlikely to be persuaded to make policy changes that are not in their own interest. Reform is most likely when challenges from outside the polity provide a political incentive for elites within it to advance their own policies and careers. As we will see in Chapter 11, perhaps the most enduring outcome of the French May movement was an educational reform on which the protesters had only minimal impact. Political opportunism is not a monopoly of left or right, parties of movement or parties of conservation. The conservative Eisenhower Administration responded in essentially the same way to the Civil Rights movement as the liberal Kennedy Administration did - for the simple reason that both were concerned with electoral realignment and wished to minimize the foreign policy damage of American racism (Piven and Cloward 1977: Chapter 4}. The Obama campaign of 2008 took advantage of the more radical peace movement that had arisen in opposition to the Bush Administrations' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as the Republican party took advantage of the anti-incumbent mood of the electorate in 2010 to embrace the surging "Tea Party." When are parties and interest groups most likely to take advantage of opportunities created by movements? They appear to do so mainly when a system is challenged by a range of movements, and not when individual movement organizations mount challenges that can be easily repressed or isolated. That is to say, reformist outcomes are most likely when political opportunities produce general confrontations among challengers, elites, and authorities, as in the cycles of contention that will be examined in Chapter 10. DECLINING OPPORTUNITIES The opening of opportunities provides external resources to people who lack internal resources. It opens gates where there were only walls before, alliances that did not previously seem possible, and realignments that appear capable of bringing new groups to power. But because these opportunities are external -and because they shift so easily from initial challengers to their allies and opponents and, ultimately, to elites and authorities - political opportunities are fickle friends. The result is that openings for reform quickly close or allow new challengers with different aims to march through the gates that the early risers have battered down. Thus, the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe that many thought would bring democracy to a part of the world that had been denied freedom for a half-century produced few working democracies, several neo-Communist states, a number of countries that disintegrated into separatist conflict - like Yugoslavia - and a number of hybrid regimes with representative institutions and an authoritarian core (Beissinger 1001). Even in East Germany, which was rapidly absorbed into a stable Western democracy, the democratic Civic Forum that led the way to unification in 1989 was swept aside by the established political parties, while the successor to the old Communist party remained an electoral force. Movements are evanescent because they influence political changes that can precipitate their own decline. The shifting nature of political opportunities does not mean that they do not matter for the formation of social movements. Just as Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in 1917 as the result of the opportunity of the First World War, it was the opportunities provided by Gorbachev's reforms that stimulated collective action in the former Soviet Union and in East Central Europe in 1989. But if contention migrates from challengers to their allies, from movements to countermovements, and from outside the polity to elites and parties within it, this occurs not only because of changes in opportunity, but because of changes in the level and character of threat as well. 170 Power in Mov- ement Suppression and the Threat of Suppression Before we begin, it will be important to distinguish between physical threats from authorities and more general mechanisms of suppression of dissidence. Some forms of suppression go beyond overt coercion, and some «o;;-state-actors also have resources to suppress dissent. In what follows, 1 will limit the term "repression" to mean physical coercion of challengers, and will use the broader term "suppression" to mean the social control of dissidence.7 Suppression is a more likely fate for movements that demand fundamental change and threaten elites than for groups that make ameliorative claims (Gamson 1990: Chapter 4). It is also obvious that, although authoritarian regimes suppress social movements, representative ones facilitate them. But several aspects of repressive regimes encourage some forms of contention, and some characteristics of representative regimes take the sting out of movements. We will have much more to say about different types of regime in the final section of this chapter. The possession of repressive tools by a state does not mean that they will be freely employed. During die period from the 1970s onward, the United States became objectively a far more repressive regime (Soule and Davenport 2009). For example, imprisonment and incarceration rates increased, more money was spent on corrections, police increased the use of deadly force against ordinary citizens, and police forces equipped themselves with paramilitary forces, in part to control public protest. As Sarah Soule and Christian Davenport conclude of the period up to the 1990s, "across a wide variety of indicators, the United States is systematically becoming more aggressive with regard to how citizens are treated by the police" (Soule and Davenport 2009: 2, 5). Not only that, but since September 11, 2001, the American state has dramatically expanded its apparatus of intelligence and surveillance. For example, two students of constitutional law, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, list eight major areas of Bush administration policies after 2001 that affect the rights of Americans and others: • Heightened search and surveillance powers • Ethnicity-based search and surveillance • Coercive interrogation • Immigration sweeps and surveillance • Terrorism and material support statutes • Military trials • Military action • Detention of enemy combatants outside the theatre of hostilities (Posner and Vermeule 2007: pp. 7~9)B 7 Jennifer Earl, to whose work the following section is in debt, preFers the term "protest control" to "suppression," but appears to mean very much what I do by "the social control of protest." See her introduction to the special focus issue of Mobilization 11(1006:119-144) on repression. " Posner and Vermeule excluded censorship from among the Bush policies, but this is correct only if we ignore the extraordinary expansion of the areas of information that the government claimed falls within national security limits. Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes table 8.1. A Reduced Typology of Protest Control'' Coercion Channeling State Agents Tightly Connected With National Elites State Agents Loosely Connected With National Elites Private Agents Military action against protests; FBI counterintelligence Local policing of protest; local police counterintelligence programs Violence by countermovements; private threats made by a countermovement Cutting off funding; tax law on nonprofits Permitting requirements for protest; financial aid restrictions on students convicted of crimes Elite patronage limited to specific goals or tactics; company towns Source: Adapted from Jennifer Earl, "Tanks, Tear Gas and Taxes: Toward a Theory of Movement Repression," 2003. Although a rhetorical rollback of some of these repressive techniques occurred under the Obama Administration, underneath the liberal rhetoric, the American state has normalized most of them (Margulies forthcoming). The threat to protesters and potential protesters is not limited to the use of overt instruments of repression. Using the term "protest control" rather than "suppression," Jennifer Earl (2003) outlines a typology that distinguishes among twelve different kinds of control, which combine three fundamental dimensions: (1) the identity of the actor engaging in protest control (e.g., state agents closely connected to national elites, (2) state agents loosely connected to them and to non-state actors); and (3) the form of the action (outright coercion versus channeling to encourage or discourage certain types of actions), and whether the actions are covert or overt. Table 8.1 reports Earl's typology but for simplicity excludes the visibility of protest control. Earl's work shows that we cannot reduce the potential or actual threats to protesters to the overt use of police violence against them, as we will see below. COERCIVE CONTROL Coercion of protesters (the left hand column of Table 8.1) was the major recourse of most regimes until the 20th century, even in liberal polities such as the United States, where no national police force existed, but where state militias and private detective agencies were often employed to repress strikers. However, direct repression began to lose its sting after World War I, when major expansion of the concept of civil liberties was achieved by the courts (Stone 2004). Thus, although antiwar protesters, radicals, and anarchists were severely repressed during that war, by the 1930s many of the court decisions 9 This is a reduced version of the typology presented in Earl (1003), which combines her categories of "observed" and "unobserved" forms of protest control. 1/2. Power in Movement that condemned them had been reversed (pp. 226-ff.). Posner and Vermeule even see a "libertarian ratchet" in American civil liberties from the 1930s on (pp. 146-149). The invention of nonviolent resistance helped to neutralize the effectiveness of coercive methods, because nonviolent protesters appeared to welcome incarceration (Sharp 1973). In response to the strategic weapon of nonviolent protest, the police and the courts began to accept as legitimate forms of action that they had previously repressed. Thus, the sit-in, punished almost universally by incarceration when it was first employed, was increasingly accepted in the 1960s as a form of speech. Diffused among progressive and liberal groups in the 1960s, the sit-in even spread to their ideological enemies in the 1980s, as the antiabortion movement gained ground (Staggenborg 1991). CHANNELING CONTENTION Perhaps because of the growing ineffectiveness of coercive controls, states have turned to some degree toward what Earl calls "channeling." Though outright repression is more brutal and frightening, evidence indicates that increasing the costs of organization and mobilization is a more effective strategy for reducing contention in the long run (Tilly 197S: 100-102). For example, when Steven Barkan compared Southern cities that used the courts to block civil rights activities versus those that used the police to repress them, he found that the former were able to resist desegregation longer than the latter (1984). Similarly, during the McCarthy Era, American conservatives found it easier to increase the costs of membership in the Communist Party than to ban strikes or demonstrations. More recently, Egyptian authorities have found that an effective way of discouraging the use of the Internet for communication among dissidents is to require patrons who use Internet cafes to register their identity cards at the entrance to the cafe.10 Suppressing the preconditions for collective action is not easy to accomplish and has its own costs. First, financial and administrative costs are associated with generalized channeling. For example, because Egyptian authorities do not know who the potential protesters are, they must make Internet cafe owners register the ID cards of all patrons, even those who simply want to play computer games. Because the National Security Agency after 9/11 did not know which insurgents were planning to penetrate America's defenses, it monitored all telephone and Internet traffic between the United States and foreign countries, thus breaking American privacy laws (Sidel 2004). And because the Supreme Court claims it cannot distinguish between speech that helps terrorists move toward peaceful contention and that which contributes to violence, in 2.010 it supported a provision of the U.S Patriot Act that bans all such "helpful speech" when it is used to tell groups that have been declared terrorist by the government how to participate peacefully (New York Times, June 2.2, 2010). 10 ] am grateful to Joei Beinen for this information. Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes 173 The second and more subtle cost of channeling is that repressing organizations silences constructive critics, as well as opponents of the regime, and blocks information flow upward. One reason why the Soviet Union disintegrated as quickly as it did after 1989 was that independent organizations that might have signaled minor causes of dissent had been silenced. In such cases, when collective action does break out, it turns from a trickle into a torrent as people learn for the first time that others like themselves oppose the regime (Kuran 1991). The Chinese authorities today tolerate some grassroots protest because local protesters provide information about sources of dissent that allows central authorities to identify the perpetrators of abuse at the local level (O'Brien, ed. 2008). State toleration for nonviolent contention is a double-edged sword (Meyer and Tarrow 1998). On the one hand, it provides a relatively risk-free means of giving large numbers of people the sense that they are acting meaningfully on behalf of their beliefs. But on the other hand, it deprives organizers of the weapon of outrage. Violent and capricious police who throw sincere young protesters into jail are easier to mobilize against than are reasonable-sounding public authorities who organize seminars for demonstrators and protect their right to free speech (della Porta and Reiter, eds. 1997). If we are entering a "social movement society," overt repression will be far less important than the indirect control of contention. PROTEST MANAGEMENT OR QUIETER PROTESTERS? After the r96os, when American and European courts and authorities began to toletate new forms of protest, it seemed as if the police had moved systematically toward a strategy of peaceful protest management. During this period, Sarah Soule and Christian Davenport found that "aggressive policing of protest" (defined as police use of force and/or violence) had declined. A slight increase was noted in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, but generally, a de-escalation of protest policing occurred (Soule and Davenport 2009: 9). What was the reason for this change from overt coercion to peaceful protest management? One theory emphasizes a deliberate shift in public policy to recognize the legitimacy of protest (McCarthy and McPhail 1998; della Porta and Reiter, eds. 1997). A second possibility is a change in the degree of "threat": Police may employ coercive tactics only when they are threatened by more aggressive forms of contention, such as organized violence. Both hypotheses are plausible, but in their systematic analysis of protest and police behavior in the United States between i960 and 1990, Soule and Davenport found the strongest support for the second one - that the decline in police coercion after the 1960s was the result of a decline in aggressiveness of protesters and an increase in "quieter" forms of action (2009: p. 12 and Table 1). In their view, the de-escalation of police coercion was directly related to the de-radicalization of the repertoire of contention. But such an Power in Movement inference is also compatible with the first hypothesis, that is, increased state reliance on the "channeling" of protest may have produced both a decline in coercive means and a shift on the part of protesters to quieter forms of contention. THE EFFECTS OF COERCION ON PROTEST11 A question that has produced an enormous outpouring of research involves the effect that protest control has on subsequent mobilizations (see the review in Earl 2006 and Earl and Soule 2010). Some researchers (e.g., DeNardo 1985, Muller and "Weede 1990) argued that the use of coercion reduces protest participation by increasing its costs. Others argued that coercive methods have exactly the opposite effect - radicalizing individuals and thus increasing the amount and severity of protests (Opp and Roehl 1990). Still others see curvilinear patterns in the relationship between protest and repression (Lichbach and Gurr 1981, Francisco 1996; 2004), while others see no overall pattern and suspect that these relationships are situationally based and depend on interactions among protesters, opponents, and third parties (Earl and Soule 2010: 76). The heterogeneity of these findings has led skilled researchers, including Karen Rasler, to conclude that the relationship between protest and repression can be understood only in light of the intergroup dynamics of the political process (1996). Others, including Jennifer Earl (2005) and Earl and Soule (2010), have focused on the effects of specific repressive actions, such as the impact of arrest on the future behavior of protesters and on different forms of police intervention. The most challenging proposal is Tilly's, who suggested that, rather than attempting to uncover general laws about the protest/repression relationship, researchers should focus on alternative causal pathways that involve interaction among protesters, the police, the authorities, and significant others (Tilly 2005; Johnston 2006), Following Tilly's surmise, we would expect the protester/police relationship to be very different during a phase of radicalization such as the Palestinian Intifada (Alimi 2006, 2009) or the Iranian Revolution (Rasler 1996), then during declining mobilizations, as after the 1960s in the United States (Earl and Soule 2006). Charles Brockett's work on Central America supports just such a temporally differentiated hypothesis (1995). Brocket! found that repression was more ferocious when the guerilla movements were weak, and that it let up as the movement gained mass support. We would also expect police behavior to differ greatly between different forms of regime - a broad subject that we turn to now. 11 This section is much in debt to Jennifer Earl's (2003 and 2.006) summaries of the literature □n the effects of police control on mobilization, and to her's and Sarah Soule's article, "The Impacts of Repression" (1010). Threats, Opportunities, and Regimes 175 table 8.2. State Strength and Prevailing Strategies as Structuring Principles for Contentions Actors Prevailing Strategy State Strength Weak States Strong States Exclusive Inclusive Formalistic inclusion; strong repression; veto possibility but no substantive change Full procedural integration; formal and informal access; weak repression; possibility of veto but no substantive concessions Fult exclusion; strong repression; no possibility of veto or substantive change Informal cooptation; weak repression; no possibility of veto but substantive concessions Source: Adapted from Hanspeter Kriesi, "The Political Opportunity Structure of New Social Movements: Its Impact on Their Mobilization," p. 177. 1995. Regimes and Opportunities Until now, we have focused mainly on changes in the opportunity/threat equation. But more stable aspects of opportunity/threat condition contentious politics. One set of factors revolves around the concepts of "state strength," centralization, and decentralization; a second deals with states' prevailing strategies toward challengers; and a third relates to the overall structure of the regime and the role of protest in regime change. In his and his collaborators' work on "new" social movements in Western Europe in the 1970S--1980S (1995; ICriesi et al. 1995), Hanspeter Kriesi distinguished between weak and strong states and between two poles of dominant state strategies toward opposition - "exclusive" and "inclusive" strategies. Kriesi's typology is reproduced with some modifications in Table 8.2. Of course, many actual states are found between the poles of strong and weak states and somewhere between inclusive and exclusive strategies. But let us take Kriesi's typology as a heuristic starting point and modify it as we consider some real-world variations. STATE STRENGTH, CENTRALIZATION AND DECENTRALIZATION In its most common form, the argument from state strength would run something like this: Centralized states with effective policy instruments at their command attract collective actors to the summit of the political system, while decentralized states provide a multitude of targets at the base.11 Strong states Iz The major published source is Peter Evans, Dietrich Reuschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (1985). Also sec Richard Valelly's "The Two Reconstructions: The 176 Power in Movement also have greater capacity to implement the policies they choose to support; when these are favorable to challengers1 claims, the latter will gravitate toward conventional forms of expression; when they are negative, violence or confrontation ensues.'3 In contrast, it would follow that because weak states allow criticism and invite participation, they can deal with the most challenging elements of popular politics through the institutional political process, as the United States did after the race riots of the 1960s (Lipsky and Olson 1976). Federalism and local home rule are particular invitations to movements to shift their actions into institutions, because they provide alternative sites for participation (Tarrow 1998a). In her research on the American Temperance movement, Ann-Marie Syzmanski showed how the movement's middle-class women leaders shifted strategically between levels of the federal system, and from proposing constitutional amendments to local organizing (1997). Such strategic flexibility and "venue shopping" are typical of decentralized systems and are less available to movements in more centralized states. Different degrees of centralization were a major source of the differences that Tocqueville saw between France and the United States. In France, he argued, the centralized ancien regime had snuffed out local initiative and associational life, so that when contention broke out in the 1780s, no civil society was available to absorb it, distill it into separate channels, and make reform possible without revolution (Tocqueville 1955). In America, in contrast, decentralization helped local associations and local decision making to flourish (1954). A pluralistic polity made it passible to avoid the "excess of democracy" that the French Revolution had engendered (Tarrow 1998a). Similar contrasts emerged between the French and American student movements that emerged in the 1960s. The first exploded only in early 196S, diffused rapidly, and soon moved rapidly into the political arena, triggering a political convulsion that threarened the Fifth Republic. The second produced a much longer, more decentralized series of protest campaigns at campuses around the country and was diffused into various rivulets of the New Left. But decentralization is a double-edged sword. Tocqueville did not stay in America long enough to see how federalism would allow the Southern and Northern states to develop along radically different lines - the one slaveholding, the other free - developing conflicts that festered for decades before exploding in a savage civil war. Similarly, although federalism did not cause the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet bloc, it was only the three federal systems -Czechoslovakia, the USSR, and Yugoslavia - that collapsed under the strain; in the third, a civil war broke out (Bunce 1999). Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. (2.004), which compares American state structures and party systems over time. *3 For example, Herbert Kitschelt traces differences in the environmental movements of France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States to such institutional differences in state structure. See his article, "Political Opportunity Structure and the Political Process" (1986), Threats, Opportunities, ami Regimes 177 PREVAILING STRATEGIES But when taken alone as a guide to action, the concept of state strength lacks agency. As Table 8.2. suggests, some states - whether strong or weak - have a dominant strategy toward challengers that is inclusive, responding to and absorbing their demands. Prevailing strategies intersect with state strength in interesting ways. In their research on protest events in four European countries, Kriesi and his collaborators found that Switzerland (which they code as a "weak" state with an inclusive state strategy) had a high level of mobilization and a low level of violence and confrontation. At the other extreme, France (which they code as a strong state with an exclusive strategy) was found to have a lower level of routine mobilization and a higher level of confrontational protest (1995: 49).14 Of course, "strength" and "weakness" are relational values that vary for different actors, for different levels of the state, and in different historical periods. With respect to different actors, the degree and constancy of repression vary according to the legitimacy of the actor, its social strength, and how its actions are likely to affect other actors. For example, in his detailed analysis of protest and repression in South Korea in 1990 and 1991, Taehyun Nam found that the state was less tolerant to the protest of workers than of students and to mixed-dissident protest, and it was more tolerant to peasants' protests {2,006: 431). Similarly, the American state - which would be "inclusive" in Kriesi's overall typology - has usually been quite "exclusive" in the face of attacks on property or from groups suspected of disloyalty. As a result of this difference, the American state presents an open door to groups that advance modest goals - the so-called "consensus movements" studied by McCarthy and Wolfson (1992.) - but sets up a barricade against those who are thought to challenge capital or national security. Similar differences can be found at different levels of the polity. When Ann-Marie Szymanski's temperance activists found the national state too strong to crack in the nineteenth century, they turned to state legislatures and local governments, where they could concentrate their strength more effectively (Szymanski 1997). Does this make the American state "strong" or "weak"? That depends on where it is challenged and on who is challenging it. For example, Peter Eisinger found that urban protest in the 1960s was far more common in "unreformed" mayor-council cities than in reformed council-manager ones